NE Scala 2016
Towards the end of the first week of March, on March 4th and March 5th, Meetup put together a small team of engineers who volunteered to attend the 6th annual Northeast Scala Symposium in Philadelphia.
I am an engineer on Meetup’s Member Engagement team, building a system that delivers smart and personalized notifications to members on our platform. I am also a part of Meetup’s Core Engineering team, where we are using Scala a lot in order to build out our platform. Given my work and interest in Scala, I was one of the engineers who participated in the trip, and I’d love to share some of the things I learned during Day 2 of the event!
This was the first language conference I have ever attended and it was even more exciting to me, given that I only started working in Scala since I joined Meetup, almost 2 years ago, straight out of college!
Day 2
Day 2 was the unconference day and it started with a casual meeting, in which every participant who had something to present would take a timeslot on a spreadsheet, such that at the end of the meeting we had a relative schedule for the day. After this, everyone was free to go to whichever presentation was most appealing to them.
And off I went!
Early Morning Category Theory with (Rúnar Bjarnason)
Eager to learn more about Scala and the theoretical background behind it (and being a math nerd), I picked Category Theory as my first presentation to attend. I did not know much about what Categories are in Scala and what kind of rules govern these entities, but I went in excited to learn something new.
The talk started with an abstract definition of Categories as collections of objects and arrows (or maps/morphisms) that define relationships between the objects. These concepts seemed very familiar to me from those of Set Theory.
Rúnar went on into describing Functors (maps between Categories, that preserve their structure) and then explained what Monads, Monoids and Comonads were, while also doing some whiteboard Scala examples of all of this. These topics were necessary background needed in order to answer a question posed by someone in the audience:
Prove that List is a comonad in the monoid category of List
Using the information absorbed up to that point, we were able to follow a simple proof of the statement.
This was my first ever exposure to Category Theory and I loved it! Rúnar's explanations made me dig more into it after the conference!
Scalaz-Stream Workshop with (Rúnar Bjarnason)
The second presentation I went to was also led by Rúnar Bjarnason, but this time it was very hands-on. He introduced us to a small IRC client & server built using scalaz-stream and everyone in the room had to implement a feature of their preference to add to it.
I went on trying to implement the ability to change nicknames while in a chatroom. The process of working with scalaz-stream and, implicitly, with scalaz was relatively new to me since I haven't written pure functional code using scalaz before, but it was a really good experience to be exposed to both of these Scala libraries.
By the end of the workshop, my implementation ended up being somewhat functional :)
Living with SI-2712 with Daniel Spiewak
After a couple of other presentations, I got to my last presentation of the day. It was about a known Scala compiler bug and it involved a lot of live coding, type-level programming, category theory (d'oh) and just pure amazement.
The gist of the presentation was a proof of concept of the compiler bug and ways to get around it. It was very well explained and, even though the material got pretty intense towards the end, I enjoyed the deep dive!
Conclusions
I really enjoyed my time at NE Scala and learned a lot of new things, from theoretical aspects of Category Theory, to more applied concepts using pure functional scalaz. I am very excited for the next conference I'm going to attend (or even unconference, since Scala Days 2016 is approaching and will be in NYC :) )!
